Were I Judith Curry, I would probably be saying "wow" at this stage. Alternatively, it could just be some dross that has accidentally found its way into print after having been rejected at least twice at differentjournals.

The review comments are interesting, to say the least. Reviewer #2, in particular, seems awfully keen on a number of silly sceptic claims that have been presented in recent years.

I suppose it just goes to show that you can fool at least one person sometimes, and if that person happens to be a journal editor, you're in luck.

I see this Beenstock thing has donetherounds before, though I'm not sure any of the commenters quite get to grips with it.

9 comments:

I liked the Editor's ringing endorsement when announcing acceptance:"I expect this paper will be thoroughly discussed and maybe criticized a bit. But I must say all reviewer’s comments were excellent and such challenging work is needed in our field of work. I’m therefore pleased to accept the manuscript in its final form."

The original Beenstock manuscript has been discussed at great lengths by "VS" (commented on by Tamino and others): http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/global-average-temperature-increase-giss-hadcru-and-ncdc-compared/

Fundamentally, the argument that a time series passes various statistical tests indicating consistency with a random walk, tells us nothing about whether it actually was generated by a random process. Especially when we happen to have very good reasons to believe that it was not...

It's not too surprising that some economists are pleased with nonsensical results about climate that arise from neglecting physics, because they've been rewarded for decades of nonsensical results about the economy, arising from neglect of physics and behavior.

... the modern world has actually converted debt into wealth. Positive wealth, in the form of physical assets such as land, houses, cars, etc. is ultimately perishable, but negative wealth (i.e. debt) need not be so. In fact, it is much more convenient to own 'debt' than physical assets:"... the ruling passion of individuals in a modern economy is to convert wealth into debt in order to derive a permanent future income from it -- to convert wealth that perishes into debt that endures, debt that does not rot, costs nothing to maintain and brings in perennial interest" (p. 423). They explain further: (p. 424) "Although debt can follow the law of compound interest, the real energy revenue from future sunshine, the real future income against which debt is a lien, cannot grow at compound interest for long. When converted into debt, however, wealth discards its corruptible body to take an incorruptible one. In so doing, debt appears to offer a means of dodging nature, of evading the second law of thermodynamics, the law of randomisation, rust and rot. But the idea that all people can live off the interest of their mutual indebtedness is just another perpetual motion scheme -- a vulgar delusion on a grand scale."-----Daly H, and J. Cobb, 1994, "For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environmentf and a Sustainable Future" -- Beacon Press, Boston.

Quoted in: "Are Financial Markets Sustainable?" by Use Haiss and Atul Shah, Department of Accounting, Finance and Management, University of Essex, January 1999.---------------

There's a comment on Beenstock et al in review at ESDD: http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/219/2013/esdd-4-219-2013.pdf

From the conclusions:

"The aim of this brief note is merely to demonstrate that the conclusionsclaimed by Beenstock et al. (2012) about the different degrees of integrabilityof temperature and CO2 are rejected once the regime-shift nature of the measurementsystem is taken into account. Indeed, a simple bivariate plot of temperature andlog(CO2ML) over the second period, matched by means and ranges, suggests the obvious: they are closely related."